The Plight of the Web Manager

Strategy isn’t that thing you can ignore because design is sexier.

We’ve finally reached the point where most everybody thinks it’s a great idea to have a website. (Well, except restaurants.)

One of the challenges of telling anybody that you’re a strategist, is explaining what the hell it is that you do. So where do you start? How do you explain the craft?

Sprints are great. Agile works for some people. Scrum is great if that works for your org. But there needs to be somebody who translates, can speak across silos and understands the needs of the organization. While I’m read more and more about the need for infusing business goals into digital strategies, there are still tons of organizations outside of Silicon Whatever that just haven’t picked up on these trends yet.

If I’ve learned anything working closely with organizations like hospitals, universities and medium-to-large sized businesses, there is much work and education necessary for those of us in the thought leader class to bring in the way of tactics that web managers can apply to their everyday work.

Ordinary people still have to manage websites. We don’t design apps for them, nobody profiles them on their podcasts and VCs aren’t funding solutions to their problems. In the race to be the lead musher, we’re focused so much on the top of the food chain but not on the people who actually have to execute strategy.

How do we manage huge digital entities across the product lifecycle? More meetings? Policy? Probably not. Better strategy requires a firm awareness across the organization that digital properties are a critical piece of the organizational DNA. Just like anything else that supports business goals, putting people in place to success means trusting them to actually know what they’re talking about.

The problem is, web education is still relatively self-directed. This isn’t a problem that needs more degree programs or more schooling. We just need professional development that manages to capture not only the people holding web & digital roles in forgotten firms and entities, but leadership within these organizations need to educated through their own workshops & professional development about the role digital plays within the enterprise.

Death To Web Magic

There are lots of articles about designers and developers. We devote entire conferences to people who do content strategy now and there whole books about UX strategy, service design thinking and product management, but very little ink dedicated to the doers who make everybody look smart when the content actually goes where it belongs.

So I did a whole talk (see slides) about a persona I called Liz who is a web manager at an insurance company. Liz is also the marketing manager, responsible for design & anything else they need from her that’s relatively creative outside of physically printing the advertisements herself. I’ve already written about my reaction to Liz after Now What Conference, but the reaction I received made me feel like we needed to spend a lot of time walking in the shoes of web managers.

What does a web manager do?

For all of the talk about responsive, choosing a content management system and what photos will go in what order on the site, somebody actually has to manage the website. There is no real standardized formula for how many web managers you need in a particular entity.

Some will outsource the function entirely, others will hire one person until they physically cannot do anything more and increasingly, there are places that dedicate entire departments to the digital medium; usually as a function of marketing or IT, the two logical places you’d expect a website to live besides an independent digital division.

Keeping in mind that no two roles are the same, here are some fairly consistent capabilities:

• Train web content authors around the organization.
• Copy edit content from stakeholders.
• Manage the content management system including troubleshooting issues, user permissions & improvements.
• Determine the content strategy and voice of the entire website, developing a style guide if necessary.
• Implement or manage a search engine optimization program and ensure content is optimized for SEO.
• Set KPIs and site benchmarks for traffic and ensure they are met.
• Keep current on market trends, research & new tools as they are created.
• Upgrade your Defense Against Dark Arts courses at Hogwarts online (Okay, I made this one up.)

How did we get here?

For years, I’ve known the plight of people toiling in obscurity in jobs you don’t know exist unless you work with them. Leaders think about strategy, about tactics and planning, but I am fond of asking a simple question whenever we talk about governance.

“How many people in your organization could tell me how to get content from their hands to the website?”

Half the time, this question is met with blank stares.

Digital is sexy. The proliferation of marketing technology demands a workforce that can leverage it to benefit organizations. The charitable view sees the world as a place that has more noise. As we become more connected, the noise gets louder and it’s harder to stand out. Every day, millions of people miss out on services, products & individuals they need in their lives because what they needed never reached their radar. The better we design our processes, platforms & tactics to remove those barriers, the more people get helped.

The less benevolent view is the cost of marketing has gone down. There are more places to spend, but you can do a lot more now for less than you could twenty years ago. Conflating digital practice with marketing means you can justify those spendy marketing budgets in a time of austerity for many organizations. This explains why every few months, Harvard Business Review is trying to sell me on hot new trends in digital marketing. (What’s a Chief Marketing Technologist?)

The web manager is just an outgrowth of old webmaster of yore, the jack-of-all trades tech person who managed the website, email servers and whatever else that was plausibly technical within an organization.

Look, if you’re in some big building somewhere with tons of people supporting the website none of what I’m going to be writing about is for you. It doesn’t mean you can’t understand how the other half lives.

There are millions of web users who work in understaffed organizations, managed by a diverse array of ragtag web practitioners who keep the lights on. To their organizations, they are often the true rockstars despite you never meeting them at a conference.

A Day In The Life

Liz is the web marketing manager for Occupational Health Inc., a network of insurance companies that merged a few years ago. There are 24 different websites, all centralized at the headquarters office in Pleasant Pastures, Colorado, a suburb between Denver and Boulder that I invented.

Meet Liz. Or you know, maybe you?

Liz was hired last year to manage web marketing responsibilities for the company. Her predecessor, Chad, left the company without much notice. With little documentation, a lot of old file folders and a ton of outdated web content, Liz had to decipher what the processes (spoiler: none) and determine what to replace them with.

How she arrived here

Liz has been managing websites for years. She started off in journalism as a college student, but had always maintained her dad’s restaurant website in high school. With digital booming, she took a more active interest in HTML and taught herself CSS using books, blogs & web videos. She built the college newspaper’s first website, but never thought of herself as a “real developer.” Still, when she got her first job out of college, they hired her more for her web skills than her excellent writing chops.

After working at the Shelltoe Times, a regional alt-weekly, she left for Northwest Central University of Colorado as their web manager before taking the job with OcHI (which is the company’s mandated acronym for itself) in the hopes that the stability and scope of the role would give her more experience than she’d had previously. While it was a bit greater in scope than she’d been accustomed to, her boss expressed her full faith in Liz’s ability to juggle the varied responsibilities with aplomb.

Dealing with “an environment of contributors”

Six months in, Liz was settling in well picking up the mess Chad left behind. Among her accomplishments:

• Implementing a workflow model for contributors to submit content for approval to the website.
• Developed monthly training for offsite employees with publishing rights to the website, providing them with printed materials that would help them remember what to do and her office number for problems.
• Providing her manager with weekly analytics reports during their own weekly check-ins. Her boss Sandi began to share this data with her superiors, which led to Liz having to brief the entire executive team on user experience improvements she planned to implement. They increase the web budget by $5,000 to allow Liz to purchase a suite of tools to improve analytics tracking and begin testing online advertising.

Things are going well, except for the meetings. OcHI has a mantra called “the culture of contributors” where meetings can be interrupted by people who feel they have something valuable to say. It has to be on topic, but that’s determined by whoever is running the meeting. At headquarters, Liz has managed to become part of a marketing committee that has a number of non-marketing administrators on board. It’s during this meeting that website matters get discussed.

In this example, Liz’s team is discussing potential changes to their content management system which dates back to 2005 and has stopped being supported by the vendor, who admonishes OcHI to upgrade to their latest and greatest version. Most people are wondering why Chad never said anything about the CMS being on the wrong version. The in-house IT staff does not have anything to do with the website. It’s managed by the vendor and hosted externally, so their input was never sought until Liz showed up and involved them.

In the most recent meeting, a proposal to spend $125,000 to upgrade to the latest version of the CMS was being considered. Linda from Accounting, decided to ask questions she felt were relevant at this time. Because she’s from accounting, no one felt like she would go too far off the ranch.

They would be wrong.

Linda from Accounting: “Why do we need to make such a big expense? Why isn’t the current version good enough?” she asked.

Liz: “It’s outdated. CMS are constantly being updated. A switch would cost us even more in time and productivity to train everyone.”

Linda from Accounting: “Why do we need the biggest fastest and best? What we have now is working just fine? I just pulled up the website on my phone and it’s really fast! That’s what’s wrong with this generation today. You all want the fastest and best, but don’t want to consider the costs.”

Tony is head of the physical plant and he wondered about this, too. Gretchen, the VP of client services hates the website and doesn’t understand why the marketing department is always talking about Facebook. She sees it as a waste of time. In the end, despite the best efforts of Liz and the people on the committee who supported the upgrade, it was put on hold for the time being.

It would be upgraded seven months later.

Another day in the life of our resident web manager.